On Tuesday, like lots of other folks, I’ll be heading to the polls to vote. I live in Massachusetts, where voting is done by paper ballot. You get a ballot on heavy stock paper, indicate your vote by filling in the appropriate ovals with a marker and the ballot gets read and counted by an optical scanner. Every time I vote, I’m taken back to my elementary school days in late 1970s in Pittsburgh: filling out my ballot is just like it was filling out a standardized test form 35 years ago.

Why is that, in a time when I can pay for my morning coffee using my phone, we still use this old school approach to voting? Surely, using a more up-to-date technology would be a better way to go, right?

Turns out, not necessarily and, in fact, it’s hard to beat a good old paper ballot.

DRE voting machines have some obvious problems that paper ballots don’t. First of all, they’re computer systems (hardware), which can break down or malfunction. Secondly, the software involved can have bugs or be hacked. Thirdly, these machines can also be the subjects of man-in-the-middle attacks, which can be used to alter vote counts. Finally, the software is usually proprietary and protected by trade-secret laws, meaning it often can’t be evaluated to ensure it’s working properly.